CHAPTER III. 1763. ENGLAND AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. 1763. NORTH of the channel that bounded France, liberty was enjoyed by a wise and happy people, whose domestic character was marked by moderation, and, like its temperate clime, would sustain no extremes. The opinions on religion and on government, which speculative men on the continent of Europe were rashly developing without qualification or reserve, were derived from England. She rose before the philosophers as the asylum of independent thought, and upon the nations as the home of revolution, where liberty emanated from discord and sedition. There free opinion had carried analysis boldly to every question of faith as well as of science. English freethinkers had led the way in the reaction of Protestant Europe against the blind adoration of the letter of the Bible. English deists, tracing Christianity to reason and teaching that it was as old as creation, were the forerunners of the German rationalists. English treatises on the human understanding were the sources of the materialism of France. In the atmosphere of England, Voltaire ripened the speculative views which he published as "English Letters;" there Montesquieu sketched a government which should make liberty its end; and from English writings and example Rousseau drew the idea of a social compact. Every Englishman discussed public affairs; busy politicians thronged the coffee-houses; petitions were sent to parliament from popular assemblies; cities, boroughs, and counties framed addresses to the king: and yet such was the stability of the institutions of England amidst the factious 1763. conflicts of parties, such her loyalty to law even in her change of dynasties, such her self-control while resisting power, such the fixedness of purpose lying beneath the restless enterprise of her intelligence, that the ideas which were preparing radical changes in the social system of other monarchies held their course harmlessly within her borders, as winds playing capriciously round some ancient structure whose massive buttresses tranquilly bear up its roof and towers, and pinnacles and spires. The Catholic kingdoms sanctified the kingly power by connecting it with the church; Prussia was as yet the only great modern instance of a monarchical state resting on an army; England limited her monarchy by law. Her constitution was venerable from its antiquity. Some traced it to Magna Charta, some to the Norman conquest, and some to the forests of Germany, where acts of legislation were debated and assented to by the people and by the nobles; but it was at the Revolution of 1688 that the legislature definitively assumed the sovereignty by dismissing a monarch from the kingdom, as a landlord might dismiss a farmer from his holding. The prince might dream no more of unbounded prerogatives. In England, monarchy, in the Catholic sense, had gone off; the dynasty on the throne had abdicated the dignity of hereditary right and the sanctity of divine right, and consented to wear the crown in conformity to a statute, so that its title was safe only with the constitution. The framework of government had for its direct end not the power of its chief, but personal liberty and the security of property. The restrictions, which were followed by such happy results, had been imposed and maintained under the lead of the aristocracy, to whom the people, in its gratitude for a bulwark against arbitrary power and its sense of inability itself to reform the administration, had likewise capitulated; so that England was become an aristocratic republic, with a king as the emblem of a permanent executive. In the Catholic world, the church, as the self-sustained interpreter of the divine will, assumed to exercise a control over the state, and might interpose to protect itself and the people against feudal tyranny by appeals to that absolute truth which it claimed and was acknowledged to represent. In England, the hierarchy had no independent existence; and its connection with the state was purchased by its subordination. None but conformists could hold office; but, in return, the church, in so far as it was a civil establishment, was the creature of parliament; a statute prescribed the articles of its creed, as well as its book of prayer; it was not even intrusted with a co-ordinate power to reform its own abuses; any attempt to do so would have been crushed as a movement of usurpers. Convocations were infrequent ; and, if laymen were not called to them, it was because the assembly was merely formal. Through parliament, the laity amended and regulated the church. The bishops were still elected by a chapter of the clergy, but the privilege existed only in appearance; the crown, which gave leave to elect, named also the person to be chosen, and deference to its nomination was enforced by the penalties of a præmunire. 1763. The laity, too, had destroyed the convents and monasteries which, under other social forms, had been the schools, the poor-houses, and the hostelries of the land; and all the way from Netley Abbey to the rocky shores of Northumberland, and even to the remote loneliness of Iona, the country was strewn with the broken arches and ruined towers and tottering columns of buildings, which once rose in such numbers and such beauty of architecture that they seemed like a concert of voices chanting a perpetual hymn of praise. Moreover, the property of the church, which had been enjoyed by the monasteries that undertook the performance of the parochial offices, had fallen into the hands of impropriators; so that funds set apart for charity, instruction, and worship, were become the plunder of laymen, who seized the great tithes and left but a pittance to their vicars. The lustre of spiritual influence was tarnished by this strict subordination to the temporal power. The clergy had never slept so soundly over the traditions of their religion; and the dean and chapter, at their cathedral stalls, seemed like strangers encamped among the shrines, or lost in the groined aisles which the fervid genius of men of a different age and a heartier faith had fashioned; filling the choir with "religious light" from the blended colors of storied windows, imitating the lambent flame in the adornment of the tracery, and carving in stone the flower and the leaf of the garden to embellish the light column, whose shafts soared upwards, as if to reach the sky.. The clergy were Protestant, and married. Their great dignitaries dwelt in palaces, and used their vast revenues not to renew cathedrals or beautify chapels, or build new churches or endow schools; the record of their wealth was written in the rolls of the landed gentry, among whom the fortunes they accumulated introduced their children. In the house of lords, the church had its representative seats among the barons, and never came in conflict with the aristocracy with which its interests were identified. 1763. The hereditary right of the other members of the house of lords was such a privilege as must, in itself, always be hateful to a free people, and always be in danger; yet, while in France the burgesses were preparing to overthrow the peerage, in England there was no incessant struggle to be rid of it. The reverence for its antiquity was enhanced by pleasing historical associations. But for the aid of the barons, Magna Charta would not have been attained; and, but for the nobility and gentry, the Revolution of 1688 would not have succeeded. A sentiment of gratitude was therefore blended in the popular mind with submission to rank. Besides, nobility was not a caste, but rather an office, personal and transmissible to but one. "The insolent prerogative of primogeniture" made its most conspicuous victims in the bosom of the families which it kept up, and which themselves set the leading example of resignation to its injustice. Not younger sons only, who might find employment in public office, or at the bar, or in the church, the army, or navy, or in mercantile adventures and pursuits, the daughters of the great landed proprietors, from a delicate spirit of self-sacrifice, characteristic of the sex, 1763. applauded the rule by which they were disinherited, and placed their pride in upholding a system which left them dependent or destitute. In the splendid houses of their parents, they were bred to a sense of their own poverty, and were bred to endure that poverty cheerfully. They would not murmur against the system, for their sighs might have been taunted as the repinings of selfishness. They all revered the head of the family, and by their own submission taught the people to do so. Even the mother who might survive her husband, after following him to his tomb in the old manorial church, returned no more to the ancestral mansion, but vacated it for the heir. The daughters of the nobility were left poor, and most of them necessarily remained unmarried or wedded persons of inferior birth. The younger sons became commoners; and, though they were in some measure objects of jealousy, because they used their relationship to appropriate to themselves the chief benefits of the public patronage, yet, as they really were commoners, and entered the body of the people, they kept up an intimate sympathy between classes. Besides, the road to the peerage, as all knew, lay open to all. It was a body constantly invigorated by recruits from the greatest men of England. Had it been left to itself, it would have perished long before. Once, having the gentle Addison for a supporter of the measure, it voted itself to be a close order, but was saved by the house of commons from consummating its selfish purpose, where success would have prepared its ruin; and it remained that the poorest man who ever struggled upwards in the rude competition of the law might come to preside in the house of lords. Thus the hereditary branch of the legislature was doubly connected with the people; the larger part of its sons and daughters descended to the station of commoners, and commoners were at all times making their way to its honors. In no country was rank so privileged or were classes so blended. The peers, too, were, like all others, amenable to the law; and, though the system of finance bore evidence of their controlling influence in legislation, yet their houses, lands, and property were not exempt from taxation. The provi |
